Blockchain Papers

Tory Jeffay

Minutes before visiting Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I was perched by the window of a coffee shop, attempting to back up my iPhone to my laptop. I needed to make space for the photographs of the exhibit I knew I would be taking—indeed, that I considered an essential prerequisite to writing about it at all. Naturally, my phone froze with a spinning circle on the screen and refused to turn back on. At the conveniently nearby Apple Store, a cheerful employee suggested that rather than waiting for an appointment with tech support, I could buy a new phone and return it later if my old device regained consciousness. And since I wanted the phone for photos, I might as well try the Pro. And so it came to be that I spent my time at Digital Witness carefully wielding a $999 camera, swiping away notifications about all the smart ways it could now document the world around me. Erase unwanted objects! Enhance in-frame audio! Record in 3D! Digital witnessing indeed.My new device seemed to encapsulate the many ways digital technologies have changed our relationship to witnessing—making possible ubiquitous capture, establishing new burdens of proof, aesthetically transforming the actual images through automated computational means. To my surprise, however, the witness referred to by the show was not digital photography, as I had assumed, or social media, as in the St. Vincent song that the curators cite as their inspiration for the title. Instead, the witness is the show itself, which observes and narrates the revolutionary growth of digital software from the age of the personal computer onward. In an essay concerned with the kind of digital witness I gripped in my hand, although written at the dawn of the iPod, John Durham Peters explains the notable slipperiness of the word “witness,” which refers to both a person, an act of seeing, and the testimony of what was seen.1 Witnessing comes with a three-piece set of historical baggage, Peters claims, in the form of its ties to law, theology, and atrocity, each of which ties witnessing in some form to deep moral and cultural forces, and most primordially, to questions of life and death. Digital Witness observes some trends in digital art from the age of the personal computer to the age of the personal feed, yet the question that dogged me throughout was: does it bear witness?This question feels particularly urgent given the long history of anxiety about digital images as witnesses. In a 1993 Los Angeles Times op-ed, media critic Brian Stonehill suggested it was no wonder a Simi Valley jury did not convict Rodney King’s assailants. Why should they believe the video of King’s beating when all year they had been assailed by commercials showing Humphrey Bogart hawking Diet Coke and Michael Jackson music videos filled with figures transforming race and gender? Three decades later, as synthetic media and AI-generated images flood our feeds, such early skepticism about digital witnessing seems less paranoid than prescient.The three areas of revolution witnessed in curators Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger’s exhibition, per the subtitle, are design, photography, and film—an already unusual grouping that proves insufficient to contain the actual works on display. The painter Lee Mullican’s digital drawing and Casey Reas’s custom software programs, for instance, fit more squarely within the absent term “art.” The intended unifier across these domains is the rise of digital tools, although the curators acknowledge these are far from the only areas affected (one could include music, fashion, and architecture, for example). This focus on tools permeates the exhibition catalog, where the Q&As peppered throughout all begin with each artist’s first experience manipulating digital images. The best answer comes from Reas, who evokes Tangrams, Lite-Brite, and cross-stitch, emphasizing the difference between digitality and computational technologies—an important elision in the show, which understands “digital” simply as the adjective form of the noun “computer.”Like Salvesen’s earlier LACMA show 3D: Double Vision (2018–19), the work in Digital Witness spreads broadly into visual culture. Also like 3D, one of the most compelling parts of the exhibition is the ability to experience the antiquated technologies firsthand. A row of Amiga 500s with Andy Warhol’s digital drawings pulsing across the screen is a highlight. But 3D was more narrowly focused, centered around the specific evolving fantasy of replicating reality in its dimensional richness rather than the tools developed to facilitate it. Encountering the richness of the myriad creative attempts to achieve this impossible idea was what made it interesting. Digital Witness lacks such a unifying concept, interrogating neither the digital nor the witness nor the tool. If this exhibition serves as a continuation of Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, LACMA’s 2023 show on the origins of computer art, it expresses all the narrative awkwardness of a sequel.If I appear to be taking too much issue with the categorization, it’s because the work itself is largely illustrative of the processes and tools that interest the curators in this anthropological endeavor. What organizes the show is three aesthetic moves that appear throughout the work on display: blur and sharpen (digital realism), morph and warp (computer aesthetics), and cut and paste (digital collage). The framing here situates us within premade software (Photoshop, most obviously) rather than in the world of coding, though some of the work is made through coding rather than premade tools. The video clip is dominant throughout. Screens play scenes from various sources, giving snippets of Jurassic Park, Björk music videos, dancing baby gifs. Several expected representations appear: Andreas Gursky’s crowded scenes, Takeshi Murata’s glitch art. Some omissions are surprising—graduate school seminar favorites Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Harun Farocki are missing, though four of Zach Blas’s “fag face masks” from his Facial Weaponization Suite (2012–14) make an appearance.Wandering through an exhibit filled with short clips gives the impression of walking through a digital feed, and the curation encourages that same passive state of absorption. The one work that knocked me out of my trance was Brian Bress’s Dune Medallions (2018). Nothing about the work needs to be digital—he could have shot it on film—but it embodies the processes and disorientation of the digital, making it strange again. Over the course of the video, shapes are cut out of a collage of photographs and illustrations of desert landscapes (a desert of representation?). The artist works from behind the collage, becoming visible through the holes that emerge at the same time the reverse side of the collage appears in pieces left dangling. He wears a camouflage costume that replicates the foreground collage. The various layers that emerge—the dangling paper cutouts; the flat desert collage; the moving, camouflaged body—trouble distinctions between surface and depth, movement and stasis. The work’s vertical orientation speaks to both the once-condemned, now de rigueur portrait orientation of mobile video and the human scale of the portrait. The labor of imagemaking is masked by the work itself, the artist only appearing in glimpses as holes are cut in the paper, but it is nevertheless made visible. As he continues to cut into the image, what initially seem to be mere graphic shapes turn into medallions of a sort. These serve as reminders of an alternative system of meaning, a return to the use value of images as religious icons, specific and nonfungible, yet the presence of Bress’s robot-like figure in disguise challenges such self-serious interpretation.The flattening of design, commercial filmmaking, and photography obscures what’s at stake with the growth of digital tools. The issues raised by AI are not absent—standing in for the phenomenon of deepfakes is, oddly, a video featuring a deepfake Mark Zuckerberg—yet these issues are, somewhat fittingly, lost in a sea of other screens competing for our attention. The unaddressed phenomenon of the digital here is the democratization of images: text, photographs, and film all become digital images, while black morphs into white in the Michael Jackson video or the Nancy Burson composite. The politics of this flattening enacted by the computer go unaddressed by either artist or curator. In the catalog’s Q&A, the answers to the repeated question of what is lost in the conversion to digital are illuminating, ranging from blanket denial (“I can’t think of anything that was lost after switching from analog to digital”) to sentimental nostalgia (“perhaps spontaneity”; “a sort of ‘warmth’ or ‘charm’”). A kitschy aesthetic of lime green and steel throughout the galleries gives the feel of a Nickelodeon studio tour in the 1990s rather than an important locus of inquiry. That artificially glowing green continues into the catalog, where its ubiquity results in the disorienting yet poignant experience of looking up from the texts to encounter a real-world tinted rose.In the digital revolution, the camera’s status as witness has been one of the primary concerns of media scholarship and the popular press. The general trajectory has been one of panic (“Images are losing esteem everywhere, and why? Because we have more control over them than ever.”2) followed by a recalibration (digital images understood as “radically breaking with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing these modes”3) to a new reassessment with generative AI. As witnesses to the digital, what have artists had to say? As viewers of this art and visual culture, what should we think? The exhibit neither celebrates nor condemns, but rather meekly taxonomizes, samples, and entertains.Wandering the galleries in the hazy days between Donald Trump’s second election and his inauguration, the existential threat that “digital tools” now present to democracy was top of mind. Days after I visited the exhibition, the CEOs of Adobe (a sponsor of the exhibit), Apple, and Microsoft each pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. As I write this, Elon Musk’s teams are worming their way through federal data sets, witnesses to the sensitive information of institutions and individuals. “To witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it,” Peters writes.4 Once we have witnessed, we cannot honestly say that we did not know. What responsibilities are kindled by this exhibit, this witnessing of the digital? Exiting the exhibition, my gleaming iPhone still in hand, I stood to watch installers mocking up the adjacent Imagining Black Diasporas exhibit.5 Printer paper delineated where the sleek vinyl text (digitally designed, no doubt) would go. Curation and polish produce the veneer of comprehension, of control, suggesting to us that this work, this world is understandable. The seams of this process, the labor that goes into them, reminds us that this work is done by mere mortals like us, and we all can and indeed do have the responsibility to engage in the always unfinished processes of meaning making. As I snapped a picture, a guard told me no photography was allowed of the installation process. This moment was foreclosed for witnessing, digital or otherwise.

Orhun Uğur, Semanur Öztemiz

This study aims to propose a website for the preservation and accessibility of street art in Türkiye with crowdsourcing methods. The proposed website is based on the literature about the usability of street art websites. The related literature showed that the websites are weak regarding institutional information and policies, including copying and copyrights, and that descriptive data regarding the works is insufficient. Additionally, it has been observed that the most common crowdsourcing method is collection completion. Street artworks created by street artists and then converted into digital form are also prone to change and metamorphosis, requiring specific digital solutions for long-term preservation. The rise of Web3 technologies offers new opportunities to overcome the challenges of documenting, preserving, and sharing these digital street arts. It is thought that this study, conducted in the case of Türkiye, will contribute to the literature on preserving and accessing street art as a cultural heritage.

P.A. Wilson, Peter Tolmie

No abstract is available for this record.

Elizabeth Kovacs

This paper examines the concept that legitimate autographic identity may be granted to digital images created as a non-fungible token (NFT). The blockchain technology coded permanently into minted NFT’s keep track of the legitimacy of authorship and ownership, keeping them from being duplicated and removing them from the realm of allographic art. Questions arise of what ‘legitimacy’ and ‘ownership’ for a digital image—which are so easily reproduced and circulated—even look like. The main question that must be answered is whether the backend coding of a digital file is sufficient to alter its ontology into a token of one-of-a-kind autographic work, or if it only what is visible to the viewer of the image matters for its replicability and allographic ontological nature.

Rémi Lauvin

This article deals with the representation of visual elucidation in film. Starting with the analysis of Matthieu Bareyre’s On ne sait jamais ce qu’on filme(2016), we investigate the construction of the cinematic image as proof. Although a key asset in the development of modern surveillance rhetoric, the evidentiary quality of the visual image stems from a century-long history. Louis Feuillade’s early accidental surveillance film Erreur tragique (1913) and Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic classic La jetee help us to discern the specific procedures of this history. Visual elucidation often resembles an interrogation procedure: images, as witnesses, are submitted to intensive, repetitive questioning. In this paper, we describe the mimetic repetition that is at stake in elucidation sequences: both the image and its observer have to stutter in order to generate an image of the truth.

Chase Joynt, Emmett Harsin Drager

We approach this paper with a shared investment in historical and contemporary representations of trans and gender non-conforming people, and our individual research in the archives of early US Gender Clinics. Together, we consider what is at stake—or what might be possible—when we connect legacies of photography used as diagnostic tools in gender clinics with snapshots of early, community-based gatherings, and the presence of trans people in contemporary art. From the archives of Robert J. Stoller and photos of Casa Susanna, to the collaborative photography of Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac, and the biometric data art-theory experiments of Zach Blas, we engage a series of image-based projects, which animate underlying questions and socio-political debates about the politics of visuality, and visibility’s impact on trans and gender non-conforming people. Moreover, we argue that rhetorical strategies of proof—from conditions verified in clinics to shared existence through photography—are tethered to, and thus trapped by, the logics and discipline of legibility and re-institutionalization.

Diarmuid Costello

I am grateful to Scott Walden and Dominic McIver Lopes for their comments on “What's So New about the ‘New’ Theory of Photography?” Their responses come from opposite ends of the spectrum in recent philosophy of photography, and I shall reply to them in turn. Scott Walden, as will be apparent from his response, is what I call an “orthodox” theorist of photography, albeit a non‐skeptical one; so it is no surprise that he remains unconvinced by much of what I say new theory has to offer. What types Walden as an orthodox theorist is his commitment to a certain view of how photographs come into being, together with the further view (not thematized here) that our second‐order beliefs about how such images come into being impact our first‐order beliefs about what we are seeing, when what we are seeing is a photograph (Walden 2005, 263, 272). For orthodox theorists, “resolute” or otherwise, this is what explains photographs’ epistemic advantage over handmade images.1 Walden himself refers to these second‐order beliefs as knowledge, but that implies the beliefs in question are both justified and true, whereas I take them to be (at best) justified, but nonetheless false. What types Walden as a “non‐skeptical” orthodox theorist is that he thinks these facts are consistent with photography being art. And I agree, although it is not clear from what he says here that Walden recognizes this. The reason is straightforward: one can, as Walden suggests, turn automaticity into an artistic virtue rather than a vice. Indeed, many art practices (and not only photographic ones) have done so: witness the fascination with the aleatory, mechanical or automatic, in avant‐garde art since dadaism and surrealism as a strategy intended to undercut an overblown conception of the artist as a self‐present agent fully in control of all his or her artistic acts. Indeed, this cast of mind is one of the reasons a certain kind of artist turns to photography in the first place—so as to mine its automatism for the aleatory and anomic effects thereby made possible. An obvious example is the valorization of the uninflected or deadpan photographic document by various conceptual and proto‐conceptual artists from Edward Ruscha and Bernd and Hilla Becher onward. I doubt, however, that these are the kinds of photography that Walden has in mind, so consider a case much closer to the issues addressed in my article. In “The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency,” Lopes argued that the affordance of clear or revelatory seeing are two kinds of aesthetic interest we can take in a scene as it appears through a photograph that we cannot always take in the same scene seen directly (2003, 445).2 The former arises from photography's capacity to isolate aspects of a scene difficult to focus on in day‐to‐day life, the latter from the ways in which photographic framing and the like can defamiliarize an everyday scene. Lopes associates both with a broadly “documentary aesthetic,” and both are consistent with orthodoxy being true. Modernist images by Lázló Moholy‐Nagy, Henri Cartier‐Bresson, and André Kertész exploiting a combination of dramatic framing, unusual points of view, and collapsed or truncated depth of field are good examples of the latter. Not only do such images exploit photography's automaticity for artistic gain, they implicitly leverage the folk theory underpinning orthodoxy to generate their aesthetic payoff. For it is only if one assumes a certain understanding of photography in one's audience that one will be able to trade on his or her delight in the fact that—since this is a photograph—it really must be possible for the world to look like this. So there is little dispute between us about this.3 The substantive issue between us concerns whether the underlying beliefs that Walden subscribes to concerning how photographs come into being are true. Here, or so it initially seems, we do disagree: I think the latter are false and that they are false because they rely on an impoverished understanding of how photographs come into being. More specifically, they are false as a general account of how photographs as a kind of image come into being, even though they may be true of how many photographs in genres that are important to us (such as vernacular, documentary, or press photographs) do come into being. The fact that the underlying folk theory takes what is true of the latter to be true of the whole is what renders it inadequate as a general understanding of photographic aetiology. Seen in this light, orthodoxy in philosophy of photography, from André Bazin through to Kendall Walton, consists of a gradual philosophical refinement of these underlying intuitions, intuitions that can traced all the way back to photography's pioneers.4 If new theorists are right, Walden and the folk implicitly endorse the same mistaken theory about this. To my surprise, Walden seems willing to grant this claim. Thus, he writes, while parodying new theory's focus on the “photographic event” as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of photographs as images available to visual appreciation: Such candidate items of knowledge might not be incorrect. After all, such things as automotive and telephonic events regularly take place. But merely highlighting properties instantiated by technologies being studied is not sufficient to foster understanding of those technologies. Instead, such understanding requires the highlighting of instantiated properties that either help users to interact with those technologies or designers to augment or improve those interactions. The properties highlighted by the new theorists in relation to photography are as inert in these respects as the ones imagined highlighted in relation to cars and telephones. (Walden 2019, 309; emphasis added) Either Walden thinks the fact that existing folk theory (which new theorists take to be the basis of orthodoxy in the philosophy of photography) is wrong does not matter, or he thinks that if it does matter it only matters to the wrong people. If I have this right, I do not know what to make of it: if philosophers are not in the business of correcting false beliefs, what business are they in? Walden seems willing to grant that the beliefs in question are wrong, only to respond not in terms of philosophical debates, but in terms of engineers (those who have a detailed technical understanding of how a given technology works) or practitioners (those who only need to know how to use the technology in question). But besides being an odd demand to make of philosophers—why should what philosophers do be of service to either camera engineers or camera operators?—this smacks of moving the goalposts. For the debate at issue concerns not how to help engineers or snappers, but what competing camps of philosophers believe is sufficient for a photograph to come into being. And this matters—which is to say that it matters philosophically—because if we get this wrong it pushes much of what photographers do in harnessing photographic technologies for artistic ends beyond the domain of photography proper. That should worry both theorists of photography and philosophers of art alike. In a certain mood, I am inclined to agree with Walden that calling what follows from taking such considerations seriously a “new theory” or “paradigm shift” may be guilty of over‐egging the pudding. For it can seem that recalling our attention to the fact that photography requires harnessing the capacity of light to mark sensitive surfaces, yet cannot be reduced to natural causality (because additional imaging processes are required to make the results available to visual appreciation) is little more than a reminder of what we (should) already know. But it bears noting just how widespread the relevant and, if new theory is right, mistaken assumptions are. They arguably recur at several points in Walden's response, notably when querying the need for new theory as a response to Roger Scruton's skepticism. Take the (terrifying!) painting by Norman Rockwell resembling one of Walker Evans's 1936 photographs of starving Alabama sharecroppers that Walden asks us to imagine. This is an intuition pump that presumes the truth of orthodoxy: that it succeeds is to be expected if the latter really is just a formalization of the intuitions underwriting folk theory of photography. But given that new theorists dispute that painting represents a bona fide, noncontentious contrast class to photography, this cannot be assumed without begging the question. It is worth pausing to consider why new theory arises from responding to Scruton in particular. Scruton's skepticism crystallizes a powerful pattern of thought that permeates even nonskeptical, everyday thinking about photography. Just how standard is easily overlooked, but a continuous line can in fact be traced from Scruton back to the nineteenth century. Take the debate between Robert Demachy and Frederick Evans over the competing merits of the painterly gum bichromate process versus the straight print or the tussle between Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson over the respective merits of pictorialism and naturalism. At stake in both is whether straight (unaltered, noncombinatory) prints from straight negatives permit sufficient judgment and control to be art. Essentially the same divide was apparent, within two decades of photography's invention, in the competing responses of Elizabeth Eastlake and Oliver Wendell Holmes to photography's treatment of detail. Where the former chastised photography for its mindless lack of selectivity, attributable to the absence of human mediation and transformation, the latter celebrated the beauty that results from according equal attention to the marginal and seemingly unimportant.5 The fault line throughout such debates is whether “pure” photography—photography in which the formation of the image bypasses the mental states of the artist—could be art, or whether photographers must choose between sacrificing photographic purity in order to make art, or give up their pretensions to making art as a cost of maintaining their photographic purity. Taking this longer view, there is little in Scruton, or many of his critics, that is not already present in Eastlake and Holmes circa 1857–1859. Scruton merely reheats the skeptical side of the debate, and he can do so because the intuitions on which the debate turns remain common. Lopes recognizes this, and The Four Arts of Photography sets out to demonstrate the falsity of every premise in what he calls the “skeptical argument.” My own view (2018a, chapters 2 and 3)—and this is where I depart from Lopes—is that this focus is mistaken and may represent the new theory's Achilles’ heel to date. Mistaken, that is, not in the sense of being wrong so much as being misdirected. My own view is that new theorists ought to take Walton rather than Scruton as their stalking horse and for two reasons: not only is Walton's conception of photography immeasurably richer than Scruton's, it also speaks to both its epistemic and its aesthetic capacities. This is what makes Walton a representative of “non‐skeptical” orthodoxy on my taxonomy: his theory accounts for the epistemic privilege dear to orthodox thinkers, but it does so in a way that does not rule out its artistic significance. For Walton, as is routinely overlooked in the rush to contest the counterintuitiveness of the transparency thesis, photographs are not simply transparent; they are also pictures. That they are enables them to function as spurs to the kinds of imaginative capacities and projects in which Walton grounds the significance of pictures in general, thereby securing their aesthetic significance. While, unlike pictures in general, the fact that photographs are also transparent allows them to function as a significant means of learning about the world, thereby securing their epistemic significance. Because it accommodates both, I have argued that it is Walton's theory rather than Scruton's that new theorists should be cutting their teeth on. 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Lennard J. Davis

In April 2004, I was invited to speak at a conference on visual culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Speakers were asked to respond to an essay by W. J. T. Mitchell titled, ‘‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,’’ which offers a series of definitions of the emergent field of visual studies, distinguishing it from the more established disciplines of art history, aesthetics, and media studies. As an admitted outsider to the fieldof visual studies, I chose to comment on the following statement: ‘‘Visual culture entails a meditation on blindness, the invisible, the unseen, the unseeable, and the overlooked’’ (Mitchell, 2002: 170). In my last book, Sight Unseen, I attempted to show blindness through my own experience, and a survey of representationsof blindness in literature and film.At the same time, I wanted to show seeing, to sketch my understanding of vision, drawn from a lifetime of living among the sighted in this visual culture we share. I started from the premise that the average blind CHAPTER 31 person knowsmore about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows aboutwhat itmeans to be blind. The blindgrowup, attend school, and leadadult lives among sighted people. The language we speak, the literature we read, the architecturewe inhabit,were all designedby and for the sighted. If visual studies entails a meditation on blindness, it ismyhopethat itwill avoidsome of the missteps of similar meditations of the past. Specifically, I hope that visual studies can abandon one of the stock characters of the western philosophical tradition-‘‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’’ (Gitter, 2001: 58). The Hypothetical Blind Man-or the Hypothetical as I will call him for the sake of brevity-has long played a useful, though thankless, role as a prop for theories of consciousness. He is the patient subject of endless thought experiments where the experience of the world through four senses can be compared to the experience of the world through five. He is asked to describe his understanding of specific visual phenomena-perspective, reflection, refraction, color, form recognition-as well as visual aids and enhancementsmirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes. He is understood to lead a hermit-like existence, so far at themarginsofhis society, that he has never heard this visual terminology before the philosophers bring it up. Part of the emotional baggage he hauls around with him comes from other cultural representations of blindness, such as Oedipus and the many Biblical figures whose sight is withdrawn by the wrathful God of the Old Testament or restored by the redeemer of the New. His primary function is to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision they possess. I will not attempt to survey every appear- ance of the Hypothetical throughout the history of philosophy. It is enough to cite a few of his more memorable performances, and then to suggestwhathappenswhenhe is brought face to facewith actual blind people through their own first-hand, eye-witness accounts. Professor Mitchell alludes to the passages in Descartes’ La Dioptrique where he compares vision to the Hypothetical’s use of sticks to grope his way through space. Descartes’ references to the Hypothetical are confusing and are often conflated by his readers. In one instance, he compares the way the Hypothetical’s stick detects the density and resistance of objects in his path, to the way light acts on objects the eye looks at. In a later passage, Descartes performs a thought experiment, giving the Hypothetical a second stick which he could use to judge the distance between two objects by calculating the angle formed when he touches each object with one of the sticks. Descartes does not explain how the Hypothetical is supposed to make this calculation or how he can avoid running into things while doing so. I doubt that Descartes actually believed that any blind person ever used two sticks in this way. In fact, the image that illustrates his discussion shows the Hypothetical’s dog sound asleep on the ground, indicating that theHypothetical is goingnowhere. Even so, Descartes’ description of the way a blind person uses one stick reflects a basic misunderstanding. He imagines that the blind use the stick to construct a mental image, or its equivalent, of their surroundings, mapping the location of specifically identified objects. In fact, then as now, a stick or cane is a poor tool for this kind ofmental imaging. The stick serves merely to announce the presence of an obstacle, not to determine if it is a rock or a tree root, though there are sound cues-a tap versus a thud-that might help make this distinction. Inmany situations, the cane ismore of an auditory than a tactile tool. It seems that in Descartes’ desire to describe vision as an extension of or hypersensitive form of touch, he recreates the blind man in his own image, where the eyemust correspond to the hand extended by one or perhaps two sticks. The most detailed depiction of the Hypothetical came about in 1693, when William Molyneux wrote his famous letter to JohnLocke.Heproposed a thought experiment where a blind man who had learned to recognize geometric forms such as a cube and a sphere by touch, would have his sight restored through an operation. Would he be able to distinguish the two forms merely by looking at them? The Molyneux question continues to be debated today, even though the history of medicine is full of case studies of actual blind people who have had their sight restored by actual operations. Apparently, Molyneux was married to a blind woman, which has always led me to wonder why he did not pose his hypothetical question about her. Perhaps he knew that others would object that marriage to a philosopher might contaminate the experimental data. There was a risk that the philosopher might prime her answers or otherwise rig the results. Certainly in commentary on actual cases of restored sight, debaters of the Molyneux question are quick to disqualify those who were allowed to cast their eyes upon, for instance the faces of loved ones, before directing their gaze at the sphere and the cube. Denis Diderot’s 1749 ‘‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’’ is generally creditedwithurgingamoreenlightened,and humane attitude toward the blind. His blind man of Puiseaux and Nicholas Saunderson, the English mathematician, were both real rather than hypothetical blind men. As he introduces the man from Puiseaux, Diderot is at pains to supply details of his family history and early life to persuade his reader that this is a real person. Significantly the man from Puiseaux is first encountered helping his young son with his studies, demonstrating both that he is a loving family man, and capable of intellectual activity. But the questions Diderot poses generally fall under the purview of the Hypothetical. Certainly, many of his remarks help support Descartes’ theory relating vision to touch: Diderot praises the blind man’s ability to makephilosophical surmises about vision, but does not have a high opinion of blind people’s capacity for empathy: The phrasing of the question here suggests an afterthought. I imagine Diderot, at his table, conjuring up two men, one pissing, one bleeding. While his visual imagination is practiced inmaking these sorts ofmental images he is less adept at tuning his mind’s ear. He recognizes that for the blood to be spilt at a rate sufficient to create the same sound as the flowing urine, the bleeding man would normally cry out in pain. So he imagines, in effect, a bleedingmute. But he fails to take into account the relative viscosity, not to mention the different odors, of the two fluids. But Diderot cannot think of everything. Now I imagine a blind man wandering onto the scene. My blind man is not quite the one Diderot imagines. For one thing he is a bit preoccupied; the philosophers have dropped by again. They talk at him and over his head, bandying about names that are now familiar to him: Locke, Molyneux, Descartes. They question him about his ability to conceptualize various things: windows, mirrors, telescopes-and he responds with the quaint and winsome answers he knows they have come for. Anything to get rid of them. Distracted as he is, the sound of the bleeding mute’s plashing blood registers on his consciousness. Lacking Diderot’s imagination, however, the thought does not occur to him that this sound emanates from a bleedingmute. His reason opts instead for the explanation that the sound comes from some man relieving his bladder-a farmore commonplace phenomenon, especially in the mean streetswhere theblindman resides. It is not that the blind man has no fellow feeling for the mute. Come to think of it, the mute would make a good companion. He could act as a guide and keep an eye out for marauding philosophers, while the blind man could do all the talking. But the blind man does not have enough information to recognize the mute’s dilemma. The only hope for the bleeding mute is to find some way to attract the blind man’s attention, perhapsby throwing something. But surely, such a massive loss of blood must have affectedhis aim.While theblindman, living as he does at the margins of his society, is accustomed to being spurned by local homeowners and merchants who find his presence unsightly, and so might flee the bleeding mute’s missiles without suspecting that his aid is being solicited. The blindman quickens his pace as best he can. The mute succumbs at last to his mortal wound. And the philosopher shifts to another topic. I am wrong to make fun of Diderot, since his treatment of blindness was at once far more complex and farmore compassionate than that of other philosophers.And it is not as if his low opinion of the blind’s ability to empathize with others’ pain has ceased to contribute to attitudes about blindness. Consider this anecdote from recent history. Some weeks after September 11, 2001, the blind musician Ray Charles was interviewed about his rendition of ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ which received a good deal of air time during the period of heightened patriotism that followed that event. The interviewer, Jim Gray, commented that Charles should consider himself lucky that his blindness prevented him from viewing the images of the World Trade Center’s collapse, and the Pentagon in flames: ‘‘Was this maybe one time in your life where not having the ability to see was a relief?’’ Like Diderot, the interviewer assumed that true horror can only be evinced through the eyes. Many eyewitness accounts of the event however, were strikingly nonvisual. Many people who were in the vicinity of Ground Zero during and soon after the disaster found it hard to put what they saw into words, in part because visibility in the areawasobscuredby smokeandash, and in part because what they were seeing did not correspond to any visual experience for which they had language. People described instead the sound of falling bodies hitting the ground, the smell of the burning jet fuel, and the particular texture of the ankle deep dust that filled the streets. But for the majority of television viewers, eye-witnesses froma distance, those events are recalled as images, indelible, powerful and eloquent. To many, like the reporter interviewing Ray Charles, it is the images rather than the mere fact of the events that produce the emotional response. The assumption seems to be that because the blind are immune to images they must also be immune to the significance of the events, and therefore must be somehow detached from or indifferent to the nation’s collective horror and grief. It is fortunate for anyone interested in dismantling the image of blindness fostered by the Hypothetical Blind Man, that we have today a great many first-hand accounts of blindness. In recent decades, memoirs, essays, and other texts by actual blind people attempt to loosen the grip the Hypothetical still seems to hold on the sighted imagination. Thanks to work by disability historians, we are also beginning to have older accounts of blindness drawn from archives of institutions and schools for the blind around the world. One such account is a text written in 1825, by a 22year-old blind French woman named The´re`se-Ade`le Husson. Born in Nancy into a petit bourgeois household, Husson became blind at nine months following a bout of smallpox. Her case attracted the attention of the local gentrywho sponsored a convent education for her, and encouraged her to cultivate her interests in literature and music. At the age of 20 she left home for Paris where she hoped to pursue a literary career. Her first text, ‘‘Reflections on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Blind’’ seems to have been written as a part of her petition for aid from theHoˆpitaldesQuinze-Vingts, an institution that provided shelter and financial support to the indigent blind of Paris. For the most part, her text follows the example of comportment and educational manuals of the time, offering advice to parents and caretakers on the correct way to raise a blind child, and to young blind people on their role in It is by and since she from the for the her first-hand experience of blindness her a of that or that of the sighted While it is that convent education would have her to the work of Descartes or Diderot, she some of the same questions to the Hypothetical. It is that the who up her have in For instance, like Diderot’s blind man of Puiseaux, she her of to the sight she at the time of her first her her a of as a or in an attempt to the young Husson the through touch, her in her and even brought in to with the or as a of her attempt to her, Husson In a later discussion of her ability to recognize objects through touch, her seems out of we imagine that she found the object of philosophical by Her on versus objects as well as her and her with the eyes of suggests an that come from question one is also the that such as and visual to which the blind have no and therefore no to use these a to a similar at readers. In her book, The World I she a detailed account of her experience of she her use of the in the was to see a good use of her education to show that the more one knows about language the it is to find that does not have some in sighted or she to her the use of would be to her the ability to at In their two one sighted and one an to put to all the hypothetical the blind before the discussion was If he had we can not only that he and his sighted would have with their but also that about which to use and which of is more who in and an in blind in the the to the discussion to far from the and that the lives of real blind people. For instance, he an from his early before he found an when he was for a as a on a because the assumed that he would not be able to the in the He this as one of of of the sighted people on person has to recognize that sight is not to that the that it would him around with He that vision might him some while viewing a or but that he can what he to about the world from and that this is for his and only different from the of sighted people. He of what I might call that the between the sighted and the blind must be and that vision is a of that these to cite his own early work on and as of his as a He also about the first months of life when his vision was to be might disqualify him as a for the since he might some of a visual from that with a who him that the loss of sight at such an early age would make from that of a person blind. And so the discussion the some about sight that to me to be far from For instance, he that when sighted people are to keep their eyes even for a time, it a kind of To his he that a of is to keep and this can lead to and I that his example is by that blindness with a a blind accustomed to the of sight, might still have similar of and to the or of To his does that some blind are by the people and can the presence of objects even without as of that when he and in a few other in the and to be in a It is not merely that they a experience, but one that is not to as to one of the a is not the experience of texture or form through but an of an and by the as a seems to toward a for a theory of senses where each of the could be into a of which function in with and in to identified at different of that she and In fact, she sound as that the in their while the can through other of their she could by the of her hand a or by the of her these blind have in is an desire to their of blindness as the of the they do not to be or people who have learned to attend to their senses in different I have to my discussion here to by people who became blind early in One of the most of the Hypothetical Blind is that he is always assumed to be both and blind. blindness, today as in the this about of people as in there is are without any visual at It is hard to come by on people who are in part because it only an when the child, or her for the which to occur only when the can that more were blind in the since some of the most of by in the and in the as now, the of blindness occur later in some Some the ability to distinguish light from while others to color, and to some Some people the to or while the vision that through space. And of the or of vision, blind people in the they attend or these theHypothetical is his are quick to anyone with any sight or with even the of a visual In of blindness, only blindness will In a of my Sight Unseen, that I had sight to to be blind He a blind he once knew who that he could not conceptualize a and that he was learned face is to it does not in fact light like an light does not what became of this or even his him only as a of the Hypothetical. he on to the history of the Molyneux If only the blind can speak of blindness with should we make the same on those who talk about there such a thing as a is merely average There are whose than or even can every of the familiar eye as in the case of can the on a toward their at a to many of visual I wonder but can such a of visual visual studies can bring to these is an of the between blindness and It is more to think in of a of in visual as well as a of in of visual or The visual studies in understanding images, who some or even all her sight, will not the ability to images and to her In his ‘‘Showing W. J. T. Mitchell a where or some of visual culture as if to an that has no experience of visual The that some will be at the while others might their with and in all cases their would have if to their visual as it, is in the as it is in the ability to images in all their and into And as we the blindness versus sight I hope we can also abandon the that use the as a for or If the is for others to see what we mean it to what we the in this way seems a to the to the same frisson of awe and It on some to the of blindness as a to which in to among those who and the blind. It also to the among the blind that the only to their is to from

Rachel McLean Sailor

Collecting Indian PortraitsGovernor Kirkwood, William Henry Jackson, and the Nineteenth-Century Photographic Album Rachel M. Sailor (bio) Key Words Samuel Kirkwood, William Henry Jackson, photography, Native Americans The past few decades have brought increased scholarly attention to issues surrounding the photography of the nineteenth-century Indian population.1 So, too, the academic eye has turned toward the methods by which these images were collected. For instance, Gerald Vizenor observed that “Cultural pageantry, dioramas, and museum presentations pictured the fugitive Indian in the archives of dominance.”2 Many methods of collecting, housing, and displaying images exist, but perhaps one of the most intriguing types is the nineteenth-century photo album. The University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collection Department has such an artifact—one of a two-volume set that originally had matching album bindings containing images of Native American portraits and locales. These impressively large volumes (approximately 17 ¾ × 24 inches), presumably made between 1877 and 1885, contained several hundred photographs taken between ca. 1858 and 1885 (Figs. 1, 2).3 While they resemble typical ledger books, they were almost certainly constructed to be scrapbooks because of the heavyweight paper and the guarding in the binding that would have made the albums lie flat when filled with inserted materials. While William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers, and more recently Zeno Shindler are credited as the main photographers of the collection, the images come from a variety of sources. The albums were initially the property of Jane and Samuel J. Kirkwood, Iowa governor (1860–64, 1876–77), US senator (1866–67, 1877–81), and secretary of the interior (1881–82). A dedicatory inscription on a frontispiece suggests Mrs. Jane Clark Kirkwood (1821–1921) gave the albums to Josiah Little Pickard (1824–1914, president of the University of Iowa from 1878 to 1887 and of the State Historical Society of Iowa from 1881 to 1900), who in turn gave them to [End Page 257] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Kirkwood album. William Henry Jackson Photographs, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Kirkwood album clasps. William Henry Jackson Photographs, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. [End Page 258] the university in the early 1900s. In the 1990s, the deteriorating albums were disassembled and preserved so the photographs could be better stored and more easily accessed. The vast majority of the images are 5 × 7 ¼ inches with a few toward the end of volume 2 that measure 17 × 19 inches. Volume 1 of the Kirkwood albums contained six hundred photographs divided by language groups and then tribes within those group according to William Henry Jackson’s United States Geological Survey catalog of photographs.4 Language groups in the first volume correspond to those titled “Algonkins,” “Athabascas,” “Dakotas,” “Pawnees,” and “Shoshones” in Jackson’s catalog. Volume 2 contained 355 photographs that correspond to Jackson’s headings “Sahaptins,” “Kalmaths,” “Pimas,” “Muskogees,” and other “Independent and unclassified tribes,” which included the Arapahoe, Caddo, Cherokee, pueblo groups, and others. Furthermore, printed text from the Jackson catalog provided the pasted-in captions for the photographs in the albums. In fact, the Kirkwood albums mimic Jackson’s catalog almost identically, with the most notable exception of 145 images that are included at the end of volume 2. Both the albums and the photographs they contain are rich sources of information about late nineteenth-century America in general and about Euro-American attitudes toward the Native American population and territory of the West. They point specifically to the immense public interest and great consumer demand for Native American imagery, widely distributed as stereo views, cartes de visite, postcards, cabinet cards, and sometimes as large-format photographs. What is more, the albums are also relics of the era’s rage for collecting. Despite the wide circulation of the photographic prints and the many forms of scrapbooks and albums that existed, however, the Iowa collection is unusual; the large volumes contained tipped-in photographs and pasted-in captions, and indicate a level of interest and effort that went beyond homemade scrapbooks yet didn’t quite reach the level of a professional publication. The photographs certainly record superficial facts about...

Bhaskar Sarkar

This paper explores the epistemic and ethical questions posed by cinematic representations of blindness. How do experiences of the blind challenge and extend the notion of visuality? At stake is an understanding of blindness not simply as a negation of vision but as a fundamentally different mode of being—an understanding that puts pressure on, and decenters, standard paradigms of perception, cognition and human subjectivity. Drawing on the Australian film Proof (1992), I argue for a politics of representation that acknowledges and accommodates the irreducible difference that constitutes the experience of blindness.